I remember an episode of Mastermind on BBC TV a few years ago where one of the contestants had chess as his specialist subject (I think the full subject might have been 'The History of the World Chess Championship'.

I managed to get 5 of the questions right. Not bad, I suppose, and better than he did!!!

I also got more than him. Neither of us were sitting in the black chair though. His name is Colin Kidd and used to play for my Pinner team. He said that he had studied for the qualifiers aswell as the final matches, but the program only had questions on the final. Andrew

Colin also used to play for Watford CC. I remember watching the actual Mastermind episode when he was on, just by chance (quite exciting - the last famous person from Watford to appear was Fred Housego, the cabbie who went on to win it!). I saw Colin a bit later and he admitted it had been "bloody difficult"!Antony

2 or 3 of the questions were specifically to do with the actual chess games themselves- eg the answer to one was d5 (played by black in a Maroczy Sicilian type thing, Karpov-Kasparov) and I think demonstrating the superiority of Ns over Bs in the endgame in Botvinnik-Bronstein.Andrew